A legal thriller with some uneven characterizations redeemed by a satisfying conclusion.
An elderly woodsman’s will leads to a legal fight over his valuable farmstead in Searle’s mystery novel.
Minnesota newsman Boston Meade interviews Leif Nielsen, a former forest ranger, who represents the last of a dying breed of woodsmen. Leif is determined to protect his farmstead on Tarn Lake, one of the last undeveloped pieces of land in the area. When a bout of pneumonia lands Leif in the hospital, the value of his property attracts the attention of his brother, Harald Nielsen, and Harald’s ambitious wife, Regina. They draft a will for Leif that gives Harald power of attorney. When Leif dies suddenly, the Nielsens are enraged to discover that Leif went behind their backs and left his estate to a professor, Sandy Brewster, who had been like a son to him. The Nielsens plan to contest the will on the grounds that Leif was mentally incompetent, and they intend to fight dirty. Sandy needs the support of allies like Meade if he is to honor Leif’s wishes. But how far are the Nielsens willing to go? The heart of the story is Sandy’s fight for Leif’s legacy—unfortunately, this theme is often overshadowed by the cartoonishly villainous exploits of Harald and Regina. (Regina, especially, increasingly becomes a man-eating cliche as the story progresses, and the time the author spends on the couple seems wasted.) The passages about Leif’s passion for the land contain the book’s most artful prose: “He pecked out descriptions of hanging gardens with a few flowers, grass and ferns clinging to tiny ledges…Each thin stratum of rock read like a page from half a billion years of planetary history.” Sandy’s task in the story is to prevent this beauty from being lost to Harald and Regina’s scheming—the narrative should have followed his example. Still, it takes a skilled writer to make a legal battle over a will a page-turner; Searle deftly fills potentially dry conversations about land preservation with drama and tension.
A legal thriller with some uneven characterizations redeemed by a satisfying conclusion.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781960250964
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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